


As a Painted Ship (Upon a Painted Ocean)

by mombasas



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Flying Dutchman, Gen, Omens & Portents, POV Sokka (Avatar), Spirit World (Avatar)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27812359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mombasas/pseuds/mombasas
Summary: When a freshly burned and banished Zuko nears death's door, the spirits intervene and tuck him somewhere safer. Sokka just wants to stop running into this stupid ghost ship.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	As a Painted Ship (Upon a Painted Ocean)

Zuko is ablaze. He has been on fire a dozen times in as many years, but this is different from the momentary sear of Azula’s flames on his arms during bending practice, different even from the burning of just a few days ago, when his father reached down like a benevolent god and cradled Zuko’s face lovingly in his hand, and smoothed a thumb over the delicate skin below his left eye, and smiled a little, and set him on fire.

The fire is inside this time, an inescapable, endless heat that drenches his skin in sweat and spreads until he can’t speak, can’t think, can’t even see. 

Before, when the fire was cooler, he had noticed things. The small, dark cabin. The flammable wooden boards of the ship’s deck above him—unusual for the Fire Nation. An insult, perhaps. His uncle’s voice moving further and further away. The constant, screaming ache of his face, which held the memory of his father’s hand. The concerned frown of the healer, the way he shook his head once, twice—side to side, side to side, like the soft roll of the sea—and just kept shaking it. 

Now Zuko is beyond it. Beyond everything, even the knowledge of his own name, his own pain. And there is something here with him. It reaches out and caresses his ruined face. He cannot shrink back. 

_OH, MY SON,_ it says. 

Something in the core of him shifts. Everything else is flame.

-

Before the comet, before the Avatar, before even the black snow and his mother's lifeless body, there is the ship.

Sokka is twelve. He’s been going on fishing expeditions with Dad and the other men of their village since he turned ten, but this trip is special because next week Dad is leaving the South Pole to go fight the Fire Nation. Mom made Dad a new _qulittuq_ from Northern caribou-ox hide she purchased from the one trader who made it to their village this year, and Sokka’s wearing the old one. 

Katara laughed when she saw him this morning; the sleeves are too long for his arms right now and the hem hits below his knees, but Mom says he’ll grow into it. The wolverine fur that lines the hood is coarse and coated with hoarfrost from his breath, but it keeps the air puffing warmly back onto his face, and it smells like Dad. 

They’re fishing half a day’s sail away from the village, because that’s where the wind died down and also because Bato woke up with a bad feeling this morning and didn’t want to go far anyway. Most times, Dad listens to Bato when he gets like that, although Sokka privately thinks Bato probably just ate too many stewed sea prunes last night. 

The sea is cold and glassy and the distant sun is suspended, motionless as though time itself has stopped. It’s just past the equinox, and it won’t set for months. In the distance a storm is gathering. Atka, their helmsman, has been studying it with an assessing eye since they left, but so far all it’s done is send a heavy mist unrolling along the waves. The fog disperses the already-weak sunlight until the day grows dim and gray around them. 

Sokka only notices because of the uneasy stillness spilling like water across the ship. On the ocean silence is relative. Even when they’re not moving, there’s always the flap of the sails and the ocean sloshing against the hull. Now even the ever-present noise of the cutter seems to fade away. One warrior after another falls quiet. The fishing nets are forgotten. Even his dad’s calloused hands have stalled over the line he’s splicing and Sokka turns, too, to follow his gaze.

In the distance there’s a ship, aflame.

It takes Sokka’s brain a moment to verify what his eyes are seeing. The vessel is far off; through the thick fog, he can just about make out a hull and two dark sails curved into angular triangles. They almost look like larger versions of the ones luffing uselessly above them, save for the bright flames that dance along the rigging, eerily silent from this distance. In the thickening fog, their light diffuses into a red glow that makes the ocean itself appear alight.

“Is it one of ours?” Sokka asks. The sound of his own voice startles him. 

Dad shakes his head, mouth drawn into a tense line. “No, Sokka. It’s Fire Nation. Or, it was.” 

The statement is almost enough to make Sokka look away from the ship. “What? You said the Fire Nation uses steam power.” 

Dad stands up, setting the half-finished splice aside. “They do,” he says, and forestalls any other questions Sokka might ask by squeezing his shoulder once and moving aft, to where Atka stands with one hand tight on the tiller even though they’ve been becalmed for long enough that Dad threatened to get out the paddles. Sokka glances at their bent heads and then back to the ship, which—

“It’s moving,” he realizes. 

It is. With every passing moment, the strange ship draws closer, advancing quickly enough that a frothing white wave breaks the fog before it. _Bone in her teeth_ , he thinks distractedly, remembering what old man Kodaq used to say. The thing is, the ship shouldn’t be moving at all; it’s close enough now that Sokka can see that the water around it is perfectly calm, not a puff of breeze to be seen. Maybe it’s steam-powered after all, he thinks, but no—the other ship’s sails are as taut and full as theirs are slack and empty. They’re also on fire, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing the vessel down.

They’re going to intersect.

Not collide, he doesn’t think; the Water Tribe cutter is pointed upwind and the other ship is aiming below them. But Sokka checks the trim of its sails and the angle of its sharp bow. Unless it changes course, it will pass close by them.

It doesn’t change course. Sokka looks at his dad, who is watching tensely but not making any move to adjust their position even as the ship nears. For several interminable minutes, Sokka is an unwilling participant in the most anxiety-inducing game of pig-chicken he has ever known. If Dad isn’t readying their boat or even preparing to fight, he must think they’re safe. But he’s also not moving to hail the other ship, so they’re not friendly. When Sokka glances at the other warriors, he sees the same mixture of recognition and uneasiness on their faces. 

And then there’s no time left; the flaming ship is crossing their stern, looming out of the fog like a phantom. Its passage is silent except for the crackle of the fire that limns the sails and spars. The hull slicing through the waves, the wind in the rigging— all of it is perfectly soundless. The air smells only of cold and salt, and the stiff breeze that fills its sails does not extend to the Water Tribe cutter. Quietly, one of the men behind Sokka curses.

The foreign ship sails by their smaller cutter as though it doesn’t exist. Close enough to touch, almost. More than close enough to hail, but Sokka knows with a certainty he cannot explain that even if he shouted, no one on that ship would hear him. 

He almost expects to find the deck empty, but it isn’t. There are sailors—not many, but enough for a vessel of its size—clad in worn Fire Nation colors: sun-bleached reds and browns, a faded ochre the color of old bones. The crew seems worn thin too, as if they’re only half there. When he looks too closely at a woman coiling the end of a halyard— _a woman!_ —he realizes that he can see the shadowy pillar of the mast through her torso. She rubs a bare forearm tiredly across her brow, pausing to look out over the sea, and her gaze goes through Sokka like he’s invisible. 

Sokka almost misses him, so focused is he on the way the flames dance along the spars, but then sudden movement catches his eye. 

There’s a boy. 

Younger than the others Sokka can see, he’s Sokka’s age, maybe a little older, sitting on the edge of a small afterdeck, hands busy with some piece of machinery Sokka can’t make out and dressed in the same worn clothes as the others. Nearly half of his face is covered by a rough, painful-looking scar that extends from his cheek and disappears beneath his dark cropped hair. Sokka draws in a sharp inhale at the sight of it. The boy’s head jerks up, one unnaturally golden eye widens, and Sokka realizes with a start that the boy is looking at him—not looking through him, or near him, but directly into Sokka’s own eyes. 

The feeling of being seen is so jarring that Sokka almost glances away in shame at having been caught staring. The boy’s mouth moves, as if he’s speaking, but no sound comes out. Hope is written nakedly across his face. For a moment, he looks more substantial, more real, than anything Sokka has ever seen before. 

And then, before Sokka himself can speak, the vessel fades into the fog once more. First the angular prow, then the rest of the ship, all in the span of a heartbeat. The strange boy is swallowed with it, until even the vague shadow of his figure has vanished. Even the flat spread of the ship’s wake disappears. The ocean around them is calm and empty and gray, devoid of fire. All that remains is their ship and the mist and the shadows of far-off icebergs.

Behind him, someone curses again.

“What _was_ that?” Sokka asks. 

“That,” Dad tells him, “was the _Wani_. We need to get back to the village,” he says tightly, turning towards the helm. “Atka—”

Bato is already directing the men to take up the paddles. No one complains like they usually do when the wind dies and they’re forced to propel the boat themselves. No one says anything at all except for the bare conversation necessary to push the boat through the waves.

Eventually, wind fills the sails and the clouds turn white and soft as petrel down.

They stow the paddles again.

Hours pass. Bato’s hands stay twisted around each other so tightly that his dark fingers have gone pale and bloodless.

It’s summer; the sun hangs steadily in the sky above them, as it has for the past three months. 

When they get back to the village, Sokka’s mother is dead. His little sister is sobbing angrily, inconsolably, into the dirty snow. A fleet of iron Fire Nation ships is disappearing over the horizon.

Five years pass before Sokka sees the _Wani_ again.

**Author's Note:**

> Sokka: "A nautical portent of doom is something that can actually be so personal--"


End file.
